Konoha, One Month Three Days Ago:

When Naruto opened his eyes, the annoyingly familiar ceiling of the hospital met his gaze, "Guess I got disqualified from the Chunin exams…" He sighed, "Man, Jiji's gonna be pissed."

"Technically you knocked your opponent out before you ran away," Jiraiya said from the chair on Naruto's left, "Sensei bent the rules a little for you, but you made it to the final round."

"Is Sakura alright?" Naruto asked while chewing on his bottom lip, "I… I don't really remember what happened after she cast her Genjutsu on me, everything is hazy." Naruto covered his face with his left arm. "I feel like I did something terrible."

Jiraiya rubbed tiredly at his eyes, "She's… unable to speak. The doctors aren't sure why, but other than that she'll make a full recovery." He sighed again, "She's been removed from the shinobi force by the way, at least until we find out how she learned that Jutsu. It's heavily restricted, and a crime to use it on fellow Leaf Shinobi, for any reason."

"Am I a monster Ero-Sennin?"

"No," Jiraiya sighed, "That's just the after effects of Sakura's Genjutsu speaking."

"But aren't I?" Naruto asked from behind his arm tears streaming down the sides of his face, "First I took her father, then her mother and now both her voice and her dream."

Jiraiya sighed, "That's the life of a Shinobi. It's hard, brutal, and far, far too short. Besides, the blame for her parents death lies solely on their heads."

An ANBU flickered into the open window, "Jiraiya-sama, urgent news. Gekkō Hayate was just found dead on a rooftop."

"How?"

"A single slash to the chest."

Jiraiya hopped to his feet, "Looks like I'll be busy. Stay here and rest up."

"Wait!" Naruto stumbled out of bed, "Take me with you! I can help!"

Jiraiya paused for a second, thinking, before a slow shark-like grin spread across his face, "That's a good idea, brat. Heh. Imagine the look on the face of the person who killed him, when they see him walking around like nothing happened." He ruffled his godson's hair, "that's a great way to smoke them out."

Tucked under Jiraiya's arm, the trip to the crime scene was incredibly short. Several ANBU were milling about, examining the area for clues as to who the murderer might be. "Alright, Show time, Naruto."

"This isn't a good idea, Naruto." Kurama growled, "you're still weak from the last time you did this, and the after effects of the genjutsu."

Naruto shook his head, "I can help. So I will help. I have too, this could be really important."

"Your funeral, brat." Despite his grumbling he still offered Naruto his chakra for the technique.

It seemed practice did in fact make perfect, and the chakra usage had dropped quite a bit. It still nearly knocked Naruto out cold, but shimmering chakra, the color of bloodied silver, rushed out of Naruto's palms, and began to seal the giant slash across Gekkō Hayate's chest.

Hayate bolted upright, eyes wide as saucers, before he realized he was surrounded by fellow Konoha shinobi. His shoulders relaxed at the sight, and he let out a wheezing sigh. "How did I survive?" he shook his head, "Nevermind, we need to warn the Hokage, Suna is planning an invasion during the tournament."

Jiraiya signalled to two of the ANBU, "You, and you grab him and help him to the Hokage." He tucked Naruto back under one arm, "You're going back to bed, and when I'm done with the Hokage we're going to have that conversation about your eyes."

Before he could blink, Jiraiya had Naruto back in his hospital room, safely tucked in bed. "Sleep, I'll be back in the morning."

Naruto woke in the morning, still feeling like someone had tied a millstone around his neck. When he let out a deep, depressed sigh, Jiraiya spoke up from the chair beside the bed, "That's the Genjutsu speaking still. One of the reason's it's banned against fellow Konoha Shinobi, is the long term effects it has on the subconscious. If the illusions don't break you, the feelings they plant in the back of your head make it easier to break you further down the line. Nasty stuff."

"Will it go away?"

"That's up to you, don't wallow, and push past it, then yes you'll break it soon enough. If you wallow in the pain and focus on the depression it's inspired? The after effects can become permanent. Then only therapy will help. And the number of therapists cleared to work on Shinobi? The waiting lists are years long."

"I'll try to distract myself. You said you wanted to talk about my eyes? Did you finally figure out what's going on with them, and my affinities?"

"Let me start by telling you a little story. Way back during the Third Great Shinobi War, I found three children orphaned by the war. Their names were Yahiko, Konan, and... Nagato. They were all special children, destined for greatness but Nagato... Nagato had the Rinnegan." at Naruto's wide eyed look Jiraiya held up a hand, "Wait till the end for questions." He continued, "His Rinnegan gave him vast powers, over every elemental transformation, over both Yin and Yang chakra, over gravity itself, and even more esoteric abilities." Jiraiya ran a hand through his shaggy hair, "I had every belief that Nagato would change the world. So I trained all three of them, whenever I had the chance. But it wasn't enough, But he died. They all did. Hanzo killed them, before they could ever grow into their full power."

"Your eyes, remind me of Nagato's. They were a very similar color, but yours have a more metallic sheen. Between that and the fact that your eyes have been coming in a ring at a time, while his came in all at once… It threw me off."

Wide eyed Naruto, stared at his mentor, "You think I have the Rinnegan?"

"I do. So for the next month we're going to use every scrap of information I learned teaching Nagato to perfect your control."

"But what about the invasion? Are we even still going to have the chunin exams?"

Jiraiya answered with a shark-like grin, "Suna's gonna have a big surprise for them when they attack. Between what Hayate overheard, and my own experience dealing with Orochimaru, they'll have no idea what hit them. For now, all you have to worry about is getting stronger."

The next two weeks were brutal, Jiraiya focused on coordination between himself and the six clones he could manage. While he was doing that he had hundreds of clones work on earth chakra transformation. And hundreds more finally began the work of trying to finish the Rasengan.

Despite feeling like Ero-Sennin was trying to work him to death, Naruto still made sure to train with his friends, like they had originally planned. He didn't know what they were learning with their own teachers, but he knew exactly what he wanted to teach them

"Alright!" Naruto crowed from his position atop a large rock in the center of the training field, "I've called you here to teach you a secret technique!"

Sitting in a semicircle in front of him were the people he had promised to train with, Hinata, Sasuke, Konohamaru, and Kabuto. "The technique you'll be learning under my wise tutelage is this," he held a hand in front of himself, palm up, "RASENGAN!"

"You're going to teach us that, Dobe? Are you sure, isn't that… you know…" Sasuke arched an eyebrow.

"If… If … you think we can learn it," Hinata murmured.

"YAHOO!" Konohamaru cheered.

And Kabuto's eyes shoon with an almost unholy light at the prospect of being taught such a legendary ability, "I think such a technique is beyond me but I have faith in your ability to teach."

Naruto pulled an inflated water balloon out of his pocket, and said, "The first step is to pop the balloon, by just moving your chakra. Like this." the Balloon in his hand deformed momentarily like it was trying to stretch in dozens of different directions at once. Then it exploded. He threw each of his friends a pack of balloons, "Here, you guys try, and I'll answer any questions you have.

It took the better part of a day, sut, surprisingly it was Kabuto that grasped the basics first, managing to get the water to spin in six different directions at once, Hinata came second, with eight directions, Sasuke was third with four, and Konohamaru was last with just three.

When each person finished he handed them a rubber ball and said, "Now do the same thing to this ball. There's no shortcut here, just power."

This time it was Sasuke who finished first, although Kabuto was a close second. Hinata's injuries rendered her a distant third. Konohamaru couldn't pop the ball yet, being too young to generate the power required, but he stayed to watch the rest of the training.

Seventeen days before the tournament was due to start, Naruto had them move on to the final stage of learning the Rasengan. "The last part is the hardest," he said while inflating a normal balloon, "The goal this time is to not pop it. You need to squeeze down on the chakra, so it doesn't touch the edges of the balloon." he demonstrated forming a perfect Rasengan inside the balloon, then tapping it against a tree, shredding the balloon with the still spinning Rasengan.

By this point Hinata had mostly recovered, and her enar perfect chakra control allowed her to master the basic Rasengan first, just barely beating out an increasingly weary Kabuto. Sasuke took several days longer to master the last step, with the cursed seal constantly leaking extra chakra into his system throwing his control off, but he managed to learn it with a week to go until the tournament.

Just in time too, Kakashi, and Jiraiya both insisted they take a week off before the tournament to rest up and be on their A game.

Before they knew it, it was the Big Day. The Last part of the Chunin Exams.

Invasion Day.

A/N

Yeah I know, Six years and this is the chapter we get?

Story time Kiddos right after I last updated this, my brother ended up in the hospital for a month, my place of work closed down (the parent company went bankrupt and had to sell it's stock, and despite being the most commercially viable store, we were located inside one of there stores, so we didn't get sold.) I also lost this chapter… 3 or 4 times before making the switch to Google docs and cloud storage. The next two jobs i had either had an hour of commute time each way, on two different, more crowded, buses, (along with a change in the style of bus meant i couldn't do any writing on the bus) or it was a 55~60 hour work week. It kind of crushed my will to write for a while.

However I'm currently unemployed, and I managed to crack through the writers block, on several stories, and decided to make the most of it. So, I now have a Pat re on. As of right now this is not my primary focus. (I've fallen out of love with the Naruto franchise, unfortunately. I haven't read, or watched any of it since the last chapter of the manga. So if my characterizations are a little rougher than they used to be please forgive me.) But I do plan on finishing it, and if patrons want to spend their commissions on a chapter of this, It'll move to the top of my queue.

P(a)treon. com(/)xahn